Decision-making, risk and crisis management from an avalanche point of view.

It looks at how high consequence and low validity (or low feedback) risk contexts like avalanche terrain (and the financial sector) mislead even the best of us into making simple errors that can have catastrophic results.

Henry Schniewind will be showing how and why the international avalanche community has applied behavioural economics and finance concepts to avalanche accident prevention techniques.

This can be seen in current thinking about solutions to accident reduction. It is now mainly about human factors and the theories of Daniel Kahneman, an expert on the psychology of judgement and decision-making, rather than about snow science, as it used to be.

Concluding on a note of optimism, Schniewind will look at the issue of how to reduce avoidable accidents. He will provide a risk reduction framework that can make activities in avalanche terrain, like off-piste skiing, no more dangerous than common everyday activity.

Snow.Guide ski editor, Rob Stewart, caught up with Schniewind before the conference to find out exactly what will be delivered to an audience of financial planners, and why skiing off-piste should have any relevance to a group of professionals in the business of money and finance.

Schniewind, internationally renowned snow and avalanche expert, off-piste ski guide and founder of Henry’s Avalanche Talk, starts by explaining that engaging in avalanche terrain activities can be surprisingly safe if basic risk reduction measures are applied, but surprisingly dangerous if they are not. This has been shown in research, most notably by avalanche expert Bruce Tremper. This is logical if you consider that over 90% of accidents involve avalanches that were triggered by the victims themselves. Less rational is the fact that, prior to the accident, most avalanche victims did not apply their knowledge learned in training despite multiple signs of danger – signs that they should have picked up on based on their education, training and/or experience. The question then is:

“Why didn’t the victims of avalanches apply their training and experience?”.

Why were they, in effect, irrational?

One of the main reasons people stop paying attention to facts, observable evidence and do not apply rational/real risk reduction measures in avalanche terrain is because, most of the time nothing happens. Indeed, a steep unstable slope with fresh snow on it that ‘should’ avalanche, will not actually do so most of the time – even when 100s or possibly 1000s of people ski on it without applying any risk reduction measures at all. This is what we mean by low-validity (an environment where false negative feedback prevails). The slope gives no feedback as, say, a stilt walker would if you took an axe to one of their stilts! This is also known as a false negative response (when the slope is unstable enough to be triggered by the load introduced by the person but does not… most of the time).

The problem is that when avalanche terrain does give feedback, the triggered avalanche can and does kill, often to the surprise of everyone… Then, with hindsight, people put the pieces together and say “Of course, the reasons were clear!”. The comments then in wake of the tragic event are akin to “Gosh, they really should have known better…” And we shake our heads and say that it’s the human factor again…

In order to understand better why people make irrational decisions in avalanche terrain, the international avalanche safety community turned to the world of behavioural psychology for the simple reason that other professions facing the same problems had done this with positive results. Aviation, medicine, military, business and economics to name a few. It turns out that Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman, author of, Thinking. Fast and Slow, and several other books on heuristics, decision making and behavioural economics, describes the risk context of the finance sector in much the same way as we describe the avalanche risk context.

From an article entitled, Daniel Kahneman: Four Keys to Better Decision Making by Paul McCaffrey 08 June 2018. In a section of Kahneman’s speech to the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) Institute, entitled, ‘The Perils of Intuition’, he states:

“We trust our intuitions even when they’re wrong,”

He goes on to say that to be able to develop accurate decision-making through intuition it requires a particular kind of experience that can be developed into “real expertise”. But that this type of expertise can really only be developed “in a context that gives regular feedback, that is effectively testable”.

“Is the (finance) world regular enough so that we have an opportunity to learn its rules? The answer is probably no… it isn’t sufficiently regular for people to learn rules.”

“That doesn’t stop people from confidently predicting financial outcomes based on their experience…That sort of intuition is really superstition. When somebody tells you that they have a strong hunch about a financial event, the safe thing to do is not to believe them.”

One of the solutions for preventing errors that lead to avoidable accidents that comes from Kahneman’s speech is to follow a set of principals based on proven and observable fact. Indeed, one of Kahneman’s ‘Keys to better decisions’ is “Don’t Trust People, Trust Algorithms”.

An ‘algorithm’ is really just a fancy word for a set of rules.

Schniewind prefers to call this a “risk reduction framework”.

Schniewind’s own avalanche accident prevention framework is a synthesis of his 35 years’ work in the field. It embraces the idea also put forth by Ian McCammon in his ground-breaking study for the avalanche safety community entitled, Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents: Evidence and Implications (2002 & 2004)

“The problem was not that these victims didn’t have enough knowledge to make good decisions; the problem was that they didn’t know how to apply the knowledge that they did have.” To solve this problem, McCammon continues to emphasise that you need

“..easily applied decision tools. Luckily, such tools don’t need to be perfect to save lives.”

These ‘tools’ just need to be more accurate than assumptions and quick thinking ‘snap solutions’, like using intuition.

The work Schniewind has been doing over the last 35 years has helped to raise awareness of these issues, and it has saved lives. Because of this, other professions that work in these ‘low validity – high consequence’ contexts: surgery, military, business, economics and finance, have taken notice of Schniewind’s approach. They have hired him to show how techniques for limiting human factors errors in avalanche terrain are helping to reduce avalanche accidents.

Major safety organisations in the avalanche and snow industry have also noticed Schniewind’s contribution. Dominique Létang from ANENA, the French National Avalanche Association, recently commented on Schniewind’s achievements: “According to estimates, Henry Schniewind’s work in the field of communication, avalanche awareness and training with foreign visitors in France has prevented over 100 avalanche deaths over the last 30 years.”

Ever striving to improve on his success, Schniewind will be demonstrating, at the CISI Financial Planners Conference, a new ‘Zoom out – Zoom in’ addition to his framework.

Zoom Out focuses on the top-level area of the framework, rather like the ‘snap decision making’ that gets us into trouble! BUT these are accurate points. It’s for when you just don’t have the time or headspace to process a lengthy analysis of the situation. It’s not complete, but it helps avoid the flawed quick-thinking that leads to so many accidents. For example, even just paying attention to the ’30° slope angle rule’ (deadly avalanches are not triggered on or around slopes of less than 30° slope steepness) and to the ‘terrain trap avoidance rule’ can prevent accidents. Using just those two points is incomplete, but it is a lot more accurate than the “Let’s just follow the tracks” type of decision-making that gets people killed. It’s also a much more effective way of accident reduction than some sort of intuitive prediction on a specific slope’s chance of being triggered on a given day (even if given by experts).

Zoom In is the attention to rest of the points in the framework – points that are known to make off-piste skiing and touring ‘surprisingly safe’. Zooming in further to more in-depth subjects – like how avalanches are triggered, snow metamorphism and other more technical sides of snow science – seems to spark passion in Schniewind’s eyes. But he’s quick to admit “What reduces risk is not deep knowledge of the subject. It’s applying the key risk reduction points. Expert knowledge of avalanche science helps you to know the beast better and can therefore help you to avoid being caught in its claws, but only if you combine that expertise with applying basic risk reduction measures – all the time“.

It was Chartered Wealth Manager, Andrew Gillett, a keen skier and a member of the financial planners community involved with the conference, who persuaded Schniewind to get involved. Gillett said: “Given my career in financial planning, I thought that risk assessment and critical decision-making transfer well from snow to personal finance and, in particular, Henry’s ‘Where/How/Prepared?’ mantra (framework) is something that could develop as a relevant thought process for financial planners. It’s especially close to recent articles and blogs arguing over whether capacity for loss means whether the client’s cash flow requirements can be met if investments fall by X%, or does it mean more without the returns of Y%, where the client’s long-term objectives cannot be achieved. In other words, that a degree of risk is compulsory”.

To conclude his session and to stimulate Q & A, Schniewind will plug in financial planning points provided by Andrew Gillett and others to his framework. Schniewind’s entertaining avalanche talk style combined with discussion about risk in the financial planning sector, will ensure that this conference will end on a highlight!